


Gonna Die Historic

by alephthirteen



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Argo Has Water, But This is Also Not NOT an Excuse for That., Except Backwards, F/F, F/M, Feral!Kara, Feral!Lena, Genderfluid Kara, Harem Member Lena, Imperator Alex, Just Real Differently, Kryptonians Work Differently, M/M, NOBODY TELL MY THERAPIST, Not Powerless, Not Quite and Excuse to Have Winn Have a Flaming Guitar, Raiders, Shapeshifter Kara, The Author of the Vagina Monologues Consulted on the Movie, Things are Pretty Bad, Warlord Kara, and green, kind of, mad max fury road - Freeform, the author needs jesus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:54:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26665516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: "In other news, China and Russia are mobilizing their nuclear arsenals to respond to what they are calling an unprovoked nuclear attack.  We wi-"The sirens fill her office.  Jack lifts his whisky, smiles at her and shrugs.Her phone rings."Lex, what have you done?  Beijing isgoneand Moscow is half-flattened.  This is doomsday.""Well, Lena dear.  I had to destroy the larger threat.  Bit of bait.  Overdose of gold Kryptonite.  I was being gentle like you would.  I put the bait in orbit.  How was I do know that he would explode so exquisitely?"---"I know I'm not your mom, Sweetie.  But you're safe here.  This is Alex."Kara looks at the sullen, red-haired girl who obviously does not want her here."Hi.""I'm Kara.  I'll earn being your sister, I swear it."She hears something.  Something loud.  Something fast.  Something sickly and wrong prickles her skin.She drives a fist deep into the earth and pulls them in.  Just as the shockwave flashes over the mouth of the impromptu cave, she throws Alex to the ground and covers her with her own body.Eliza coughs.  Alex groans.  Jeremiah is not breathing.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer, Jess/Original Female Character, Kara Danvers/Lana Lang/Lena Luthor, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Kara/Original Female Characters
Comments: 40
Kudos: 54





	1. Collateral Damage

**Author's Note:**

> We're having Kara land at her comics age here (16-ish) and Lena and Jack start the nanobot business earlier (20ish). Since World War III hits the day she lands, let alone before she goes to Midvale High, we're not going to have a CatCo or anything.  
> \-----  
> Lena is bisexual here, as is her business (and sexual partner) in college, Jack Spheer. They are nearly to the point they reached in the show with the anti-cancer nanobots. Jack is Hindu (not sure it was ever touched on the show) for reasons that will mostly play into Lena's survival.  
> \-----  
> 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lex really doesn't care who gets hurt.

**Lena - 0 Days**

"We've also lost our Moscow correspondent. We will get back to you soon with more breaking news."

Lena looks at NASA's live feed from the space station and pulls up her phone's map app. Sixteen massive blasts all over Asia. Big as the Tsar Bomba test in 1960. Mostly nowhere except for dead-on in Beijing China, off the coast of Japan and in Northeastern Russia, not destroying Moscow entirely. Only halfway. The floor is still quivering as shockwaves bounce back and forth through the planet.

The lady on CNN is terrified. Some moron just made her read a piece about the election. The election three months away. Unless all the world leaders are high as a kite on ecstasy right now, in three months election will be about choosing to give your wife the last bullet or your kid.

"This just in, China and Russia are mobilizing their nuclear arsenals to respond to what they are calling an unprovoked nuclear attack. No word so far on the whereabouts of Superman and no word from the White House whether he will be assisting in keeping the peace. We wi-

The sirens fill her office.

Her phone rings.

"Lex," she snarls.

She didn't have to look. He calls at the worst times.

"I know, I know, I forgot about Thanksgiving," he chortles. "Just calling to say 'you are welcome' because I _finally_ got that bastard."

Lena turns the phone away so she can vomit onto her desk. 

"You. These weren't _nukes._ This was Kryptonian solar energy released when he died."

"Yes, well, the Chinese Communist Party isn't known for the xenoscience division."

"Lex, what have you done? Beijing is <em>gone</em> and Moscow is half-flattened. This is doomsday."

Lex sighs.

"Poor roll of the dice on impact sites, yes. Inconvenient, I admit. Never you fear. Mother's graciously agreed to allow you the Berkshire property and the fallout shelter there. I had to destroy the larger threat. The pod proved the _perfect_ bait. How could that hero resist saving another lost child? Overdose of gold Kryptonite. I was being gentle like you would. I put the bait in orbit. How was I do know that he would explode so exquisitely?"

Lena lets her phone fall into to the vomit. Jack is just fucking sitting there, soldering away as if nothing had happened. As if there aren't subs breaking the ice right now, reading their missiles for the nine-minute flight to Metropolis, DC, New York, Boston. To the shabby student apartments near MIT.

"Jack?"

Jack closes the nanobot capsule, lifts his whisky, smiles at her and shrugs.

"Sorry, love...but there's only one. We never got the specific-anti-tumor programming right but for this, that's a good thing. I think we both know which of us will help the survivors going forward."

He sips his whisky. His whisky that smells like _almonds._ He takes a copy of Bagahavd Gita out of his desk. The one his mother mailed him along with an academically worded letter about the 'western whore' he was dating.

"Jack, no. Not _alone._ "

He just poisoned himself and he grins that stupid, lopsided, easy grin. The rakish grin that pairs well with ' _give you my BIO132 notes if you give me COMP208_ ' and equally well with ' _after breakfast, let's save the world_ ' and is just so soft, easy and so _Jack_ that it hurts to breathe.

"You won't be. I'll be with you. Every time you heal. or don't get sick.

"Hopefully I have been wicked enough to come back as a cockroach. They'll probably corner the market and I suppose they don't live long. Rinse and repeat. If you see any cockroaches, wave. More like five minutes now, love. I'd be terribly cross if you died. I think I would make smashing cockroach but I don't think you'd be nearly so pretty as a cockroach."

She climbs into his lap, puts her lips to his forehead and offers her wrist for the nanite injector.

"I'm sorry, Jack. We did this to save people and I'm wasting it."

"I'm not sorry, love. I can save one person."

She's still kissing him when the world turns white and Boston sweeps away like so much dust.

\-----

Lena screams but it's reflex, she realizes. Not pain. She doesn't _feel_ anything. Not even when her new skin dries and she finds herself three floors down in a perfectly spherical crater that must have been drained of various minerals and elements to rebuild her.

The nanites won't let her die and things like thirst or hunger or anything like them that's dull and total? Those don't register. The swarm seem to decide that the pain is to be quelled and to trust her to heed the warning. On the third day, she tried to stop drinking water she knew to be toxic. Slept. Laid down to join her species, she hoped. No such luck. She awoke to clear, pure, chilly water in a small puddle in front of her face, a cup of shining quicksilver suspended on a thread of dancing nanites that had emerged from under her fingernails, it seemed.

She needed water and if there was none nearby, the nanites would sneak out and find it. She wasn't allowed to die but the program wasn't to torture her.

On day five, she starts to suspect Jack had began a program for this behavior ages ago. It's just to good to be a slapdash two-liner he put together just int time. She was cold. A ratty but serviceable bubble coat starts scraping along with the ash, dragged by microscopic motors. Whatever subroutine he loaded is her guardian angel. It detects needs, it fills them.

This technology was _supposed_ to cure cancer. It was _supposed_ to cure _anything_ bad that could happen to the human body. They actually had notes on senescence, what to do if the subject didn't age. 

Apparently, given how she should be pissing blood from three organs and puking up nine kinds of cancer even if she hadn't been almost _vaporized_ it was everything they thought it could be.

This could have conquered death for the human race. Forever.

Too little, too late.

She doesn't feel anything until days later when she cuts her foot on debris in what had been a Barnes and Noble. That's sharp pain. _Localized_ pain. A teachable moment. That the nanites allow even if they knit the wound in seconds.

 _Naughty girl, cutting your foot,_ they seem to scold.

The religion section at the back had books on Hinduism and Mormonism, curiously enough. Those were H and M and because of the pillars that held the building up the two on the one part of the shelf shadowed from the first flash.

The casher is a shadow on the wall of a young woman covering her eyes. The register is congealed lumps of melted-down plastic. She leaves some money she found in the coffee can on the third day anyway.

After four days, she finds a male cockroach -- thanks to ENTO108, she knows how to check -- and puts it in a jar in her backpack.

She names it Jack.

She names her invisible friend Shoulder Demon because it just seems to encourage her to do stupid things. LIke try and survive in so much awful.

She finds a little girl on day nine, dying. Hair shed in greasy clumps. Coughing blood, too weak to speak. She manages with great difficulty (and a magnet) to transfuse some blood but nothing but drops. The girl recovers for a few hours. Eats unheated soup. Asks Lena to pray with her. Thanks Lena. Lies down. Falls into a peaceful, deep sleep. Dies.

She stops looking for survivors after that.

The West Coast will have been less impacted. Fewer military targets and fewer iconic cities to strike. LA and San Francisco and Seattle are farther apart than Boston and New York and DC. Much farther.

Like many before her, she strikes out for California.

\-----

She stops at Lex's favorite property. She finds him with a bullet between the eyes and a bloody, delirious Lois Lane clutching an M-16 with the soldier's dog tags half-melted around the stock. Dog tags on the rifle read 'Lucy Lane, 1st Lt.' but she says she never found her sister's body, or any bodies. Just a few wrecked vehicles and the gun. There's a chance.

She's nursing sore, terribly swollen thyroid glands and likely doesn't have long. With Lex's workbench, Lena has enough electromagnets to disrupt the nanites and give a proper transfusion. Lois thanks her. Takes her pick of Lex's toybox in the panic room. Takes ammo for her sister's rifle. Takes paper. Takes a portable typewriter and bags stuffed with ribbons. Leaves.

They agree to meet up in ten years, at the joining of the Missouri and Mississippi river, a landmark which nothing can obscure. 

Just to touch base.


	2. Lost Tribes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kara's introduction to Midvale is cut short and the legacy of the Justice League is passed to her.

Kal had to leave as soon as he opened her pod. Another was entering the atmosphere, he said. They had detected her en route so they found a family to shelter her. He sketched a map. A hill, near a natural harbor, on the coast of the continent she landed on.

The sketch was good, meant to be read from above.. She finds it easily, dropping down a few paces from the family waiting there. They look so Kryptonian it amazes her. They lack the grooves in the skin that Saturnarians have, or the lack of hair of Daxamites. The elder female, the wife and mother, could stand beside Nyssa Vex as Kara knew her, later in life and no one would dare to disagree if they claimed to be sisters.

Perhaps the three Lost Houses are not all a matter of legend and anti-Daxamite propaganda.

Kara approaches the elder female and kneels.

"I greet you."

She is lifted to her feet and held close. Hands rub her back.

"I know I'm not your mom, Sweetie. But you're safe here. My name is Eliza. This is Alex. That is my husband, Jeremiah."

Kara looks at the sullen, red-haired girl who obviously does not want her here.

"Hi."

"I'm Kara. I know I don't belong to Eliza and you do. But I'll earn being your sister, I swear it."

She hears something. Something loud. Something fast. Something sickly and wrong prickles her skin. She drives a fist deep into the soil and rock before flying back to the opening and yanking them inside.

Just as the shockwave flashes over the mouth of the impromptu cave, she throws Alex to the ground and covers her with her own body.

Eliza coughs.

Alex groans.

Jeremiah is not breathing.

It is dark.

\-----

Alex is not injured. Eliza has a broken ankle and with Kara's help and knowledge of the _exact_ location of the hairline fracture, they easily splint it.

Jeremiah is dead. Not her fault, Eliza assures her. He was prone to heart strain when afraid.

Alex seems to blame her.

\-----

They dig until they find the house. Kara mostly. she is strong. Disaster followed her arrival. It is her guest's duty.

The house above has burned. A few things can be found. Something called a radio. Something called and ax. Bottled water.

"Dispose of it," Kara tells Eliza, her voice harder than Astra's when she would visit her soldiers.

"Radiation."

"How can you tell?"

"I can see it."

Alex shrugs.

"Probably has Superman's X-Ray vision. Probably has Superman's hearing and vision. Probably has Superman's heat vision. Probably has Superman's freeze breath. Probably has SOMEWHERE ELSE SHE COULD BE!"

Eliza scolds Alex.

Kara asks her not to. Alex is grieving, she reminds Eliza. They all are.

Kara makes them leave. She can see there is too much radiation for them here, but not yet too much inside them.

They will dig deeper. They will wait.

\-----

The radio said there was a war. Kara supposes it's true. The shockwaves she felt before the disaster though, no human technology could make those.

Kal could. Kal could if he gave his life in one great burst of strength.

One solar flare.

She failed to save Kal. He had to save _her_ instead.

She did save these two humans. Two is a small number but it is a start.

She distracts herself by hunting. Sometimes the large animals have less-irradiated parts.

Others are starving, she sees it even though bedrock. Barbarism is descending. She wishes to take Alex and Eliza to humanity, to more of their own kind but not yet. Not while the surface still sizzles and not when so many seem so brutish and cold.

Humanity may not recover. This may be to them what Kyorsa was to the Tkra people, a cataclysm followed by stupid cruelty until all the murderers and butchers have dealt with each other. Their last rotation around their star.

Starvation, Slavery, Stealing. These three things seem to be a constant of a falling race. Kara sees all of them from below, safe under the rock and locked behind the boulder that she moves aside each morning.

Wickedness will never find them.

Never hers.

Never her new house. 

Not while Kara breathes and Eliza and Alex of House Danvers can be kept safe.

She hunts more.

Eliza makes her hunt differing animals before 'me and Alex get fat' she jokes.

Kara fills out the cave, gives them each little rooms with some privacy. 

In the center, she lets herself float. She meditates. She prays. She aches to see Rao's light blazing over the horizon again.

\----

She never attached meaning to Earth days. Time passes. It must be. It isn't something she can measure. The skies are grey, almost always, and cold, almost always, so the seasons give no help in that. She is never fully sure if two trips in the daytime are different days or the same. She can see the star -- Sol, Alex says it is called -- across all that space. When she can see it without looking through the planet, Alex tells her, that is daytime.

After that, she can count. She must be careful. There is little sun and she's to use her powers often to avoid crashing trees or to brace against floods or windstorms. She might deplete herself.

It is ninety-two more days before she meets someone on the surface. 

She says she was a friend of Kal, of Superman. Says she is named M'Gann. She too is dying. She has many gifts. She can pass through solid objects and change shapes and reach into the minds of others, even into Kara's if she truly strains herself. Fire. Fire is her weakness and the part of her body she shifted to form armor has failed, at long last.

Kara promises to sit with her until she passes to H'ronmeer, their god.

M'Gann talks about Clark, as he preferred to be called. Superman. Kal.

She worked with him in something called the Justice League. Most are dead now. 

One dressed as a flying rodent. He died of sickness after loading many onto boats for remote places farther from the blasts.

One moved very fast. He died almost immediately as he chose to collect as many humans as he could before the edge of the shockwave reached them.

One was Diana, kind, beautiful giant of a woman who set sail with some survivors before sickness set in. Went home to an island protected by magic. Last of the Old Gods. Those whom the New Gods of Apokolips and New Genesis speak of in whispers, not the roars they speak to races like Kryptonians.

One, a woman named Kendra remains but her husband does not. They wore metal armor which M'Gann describes like a living thing -- Kendras always seemed to find a way to bump her when she walked past -- matches what Kara knows of Nth Metal. They are clearly Thangarian nobles to own so much but the winged form is beyond rare. It was always rumored that one of the Lost Houses gave up Krypton for a planet of cool clouds, gentle rain and floating rock. Perhaps after many eons, they grew wings.

M'Gann is fading completely when she asks Kara for a favor. Two, actually. 

First, wishes to be taken to Mars and buried, near a friend named J'onn who left Earth when he was burned, poisoned and could save no more. 

Second, she wishes to meld, fully, with Kara even though the effort will kill her. M'Gann regrets that Kara never saw earth before it was...this. Never saw why they were _worth_ saving.

They do. M'Gann had been her for centuries. There was much to hold dear about humans. Deep in her memories, more than likely the oldest memories of her ancestors, Kara sees a ship. Silver. Gleaming. Sinuous. A first-age cruiser as it lifts off from a dry, dusty world. In the oldest form of Kandoori, the vessel's prow carries one word.

_H'ronmeer._

Kara resolves to find the other graves after returning with to Alex and Eliza with her hunt. 

The grave of Cyborg, who could take Apokoliptian technology into his flesh and remain good. In ages past, Krypton fought Apokolips. No soldier ever returned but no counter-invasion came either. Planets between held empty cities of metal and great, sky-scraping pyramids of parademon bones. So perhaps they were never _defeated_ either. Perhaps the survival of Victor Stone and the now-dead heroes, the metahumans, mean that Earth as their last port of call. That humans became their saviors, as they have since for Kara. They were not annihilated. They ran. Settled. Married. Became quieter and smaller to honor their new families.

It makes her happy, thinking that the three Lost Houses all found the Earth to share with Kara, last of the Thirteen Houses. 

The grave of Carter, husband of Kendra. Hawkman, of Thangar. Bearer of the gifts of the Sky House.

The grave of M'gann, lover of J'onn. Child of Mars. Bearer of the gifts of the Ghost House.

The gave of Victor Stone, of Earth. Human. Bearer of the gifts of the Unnamed House.

\-----

Kara tells Eliza and Alex of the legend.

Oa arose first, this much is known. Only the dark age ruled by a singularly wicked goddess, Perpetua, and then the age of Monitor, New Genesis and its wicked shadow, Apokolips, preceded them. Oa is oldest by far among the races of the third age. Other races grew powerful but never too powerful. Never enough to challenge Oa. When they approached the threshold, they would be changed. Plagues would make them weaker. Or their planet would be split so that two nations who together, might discover great things, would discover lesser things. Non-threatening things.

Before Krypton.

Oa sued for peace in the end and in return for their lives they were made to free the Blue, Violet and White Lanterns from their control. Their ambassador begged Kryptonians to spread. Fill the galaxy. See how Oa had never been wicked. See how their way had been the only way.

Four houses participated. Records are few. The fleet was set upon by a titanic, mindless creature, scout ships later discovered.

House El's ship was first in the formation. Vaporized. Three houses whose names are now lost had ships in the flotilla which survived. Either loss of records or mutiny makes it unclear if all, or some, or almost none of the escape pod survivors returned to Krypton.

That became the legend of the lost houses.

Alex breaks the silence after the story.

"Would it mean anything?" she says, quietly. "wouldn't they just be more...well, more of you?"

"It was nineteen million Earth years ago, Alex. Genetic technology was primitive, meant only to enable settlers to be able to breathe, or drink the water and no more. They could be anyone now, if they wished."

"Tell us more stories in the morning, please."

Alex's voice is quieter now when she speaks to Kara. Less angry.

"I shall, sister."

Alex turns over to sleep.

"I have a sister," she whispers to herself.

\-----

The graves are easy to locate. A small cult maintains each. 

At M'ganns, she takes Martian soil into her hands, smears it on her face, and says the words. She takes another handful of soil, the parting gift, it is called, only to find it passing through her hand which has become transparent and tinged, like a red shadow without substance.

At Cyborg's grave, her hand turns blue and cold and she hears chattering, skittering noise in her head. 

At Hawkman's grave, pain brings her to her knees before she can approach it. Fire fills her blood. Great, sharp-angled wings emerge from her back and are then gone. The pain is too much. She faints.

Alex and Eliza are alive, but hungry when she recovers and returns to them. She is not yet ready to tell them that she can still hear those calls. Calls to change herself. Calls to build. Calls to hide the sun in her shadow and never touch the ground, to liveon wings of flame.

They grow louder and louder.

\-----

On the five hundred and ninth day Kara has been able to count, they lave the cave. Radiation is low, now. Heavy clothing and careful choices in where to rest and what to eat suffice. It is very cold, which suppresses the raiders who travel the roads. 

Big animals are scarce. Small animals are not.

Alex teaches Kara to make a dish from rabbit, sheets of dough and lots of spices. It can be cooked in the steam over the water as they purify it. She says it reminds her of something once called 'potstickers'. 

Kara likes them. She puts two in her mouth at once, she likes them so much.

Alex laughs for the first time. Alex and Eliza need a home and they wish Kara to share it, which makes her cry. Eliza wants to help others, to bring survivors together so something can be rebuilt, as soon as possible. So that diseases Eliza could treat with moldy bread and glass to distill a medicine don't being to kill generations of babies in their beds once again

M'Gann's memories make her curious. Cyborg's whisper in her mind make her _bored_ in woods and wild places, make it hard to sleep in a different place every night and make her hands twitch when she does nothing. Hawkman's flame and wings make her want to conquer.

They need a fortress.

First, Kara knows she needs to practice. The fourteen tribes must work as one, if only for Kara's lifetime. Long enough that a healthy, replenished, perhaps even wiser humanity is the beneficiary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This wasn't so much about giving Kara more powers (I mean, she already has a lot) but I wanted Krypton to be like the Ancients in Stargate and also to have a bit of the lost tribes of Israel motif. Canonically, the "free Daxamite" faction fucked around a lot and some Kryptonian DNA is found in many species in the DC universe. It gives Kara her own legend of long ago to chase to put her on equal footing with a reeling, superstitious human race.


	3. Keeping the Seeds Whole

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where a feral Lena Luthor spreads common sense engineering and mechanical skills to the masses.

**Lena - +5 years**

The first few lessons Lena learned were easy. 

The very first lesson was that preppers are either lunatics or harmless. 

So she learned to approach them without listening to their shouted warnings. Hands up, nice and easy. If they shot her, she let the nanites work and then asked them to apologize and that she just wanted to talk. If they shot her _again_ she waded through however many bullets and wounds stood between where she was and putting a knife in their brain. One-third of the time, that meant blood on her hands and stealing some 'cheat day' food like actual canned meat or in one case, chocolate frosting.

Usually, it was the rare treasure of seeing a human child alive if a bit confused, with its family, being homeschooled in what had been and maybe could be useful knowledge once again. Maybe trading notes on her map for a bar of soap and their observations about the area.

College campuses, particularly private colleges, are often more remote areas and less damaged. The occasional lunatic colony of frat boys using the cheerleading team as sex toys. That's why Lena carries a pistol, fentanyl, a hedge clippers and dynamite whenever she enters a college campus. The trick is to get the big dog first. Blow open whatever file-cabinet defensive wall they make. Wait until dark for them to get bored looking for the cause. Sneak in. Needle in the neck so he can't fight back. Pass the head bitch in charge the hedge clippers and have her friend get a tarp for the spatter. 

There's probably a goddamned religion starting up of captives she freed. She's a Luthor. She needs ego like she needs air.

More importantly, colleges are a trove of books, tools, older and more durable computer technology, chemicals, medical supplies, frogs and mice and lab animals that you can eat now that biology class is out.

If she must live in this world, she will save it. That's her deal with herself and with Jack.

In her own mind alone are enough engineering classes to leapfrog an interested group from say 1850 to 1950 technologically. There's no need to go from the ground up, this time. The know-how remains when the will is there. Better and more specific knowledge, especially in a digestible form, is needed.

College by college, she builds a library, a few at a time, hauled back to a sprawling, empty Army bunker in Kansas.

In the winter, she digitizes them and loads them onto flash drives.

She builds apocalypse proof computers. Hand cranks, water sealed ammunition boxes for cases, multiple bare-board processors to allow failures, metal typewriter keys. She stashes them at caches along her travels.

Then she meets a living, walking miracle.

Jessica Haung is a library sciences post-doc she meets huddling in an old strip club in no-fucking-where Texas. Jess makes her feel like they can _win_ this.

> "You believe this is the only place to get beer?" she grumbled to Lena when the light from the cracked-open door hit her hungover eyes.
> 
> Lena shrugged. She set her gun in between them. It had become a sort of be-cool gesture. 
> 
> "Don't drink. Were the girls cute?"
> 
> Jess broke into pieces. Hers was. Tuyet was. Her dirty secret, her stripper girlfriend she couldn't take to faculty parties with dreams so bright and so clear that it made Jess smile throguh all her grief just describing what they might have had.

The sex was sloppy and stupid and they both felt worse and lonelier after than before, having betrayed long dead, not-remotely-processed exes but in their heads the number of queer women went from 1 to 2 just then and it was too good a feeling not to act on. 

They agree never to speak of it again.

So they speak of the work. Jess suggests old laser printers with high capacity cartridges. Heavy, but movable. Hewelett Packard made one squat, beige abomination that seems to be on every floor of every third library in every small town college they visit and each cartridge cranks out 20,000 pages.

If they digitize the books properly and a cache has a working printer, it can duplicate the whole library. This opens up a new form of trade or in charity or however to trading partners or would-be allies in the spattered web of city-states springing up on the map that had once just been one big, weird, idea that wasn't really a country. It was all those cities added up.

One of Lena's computers -- Jess brands them Apocbooks -- can store the data several times over. Lena doubles down, improves the design, hits up Super Walmarts in towns too small to bother nuking for more Raspberry Pis and tablets for screens. She finalizes a clear, concise design that uses parts common in bargain bins and sale shelves in chain stores. She whistles the process down to where she can make a unit in two days with half the solder of before. 

Then she rewrites the operating system entirely. 

Then she figures out how to make repair kits others can use. How to make slots for when one crappy tablet screen burns out and another is needed.

Then writes a book on how she did it. Someday, _that's_ going to be the technology someone expands on.

Lena has learned to give a transfusion. Jess isn't like her, isn't able to walk through gunfire or dive into a ruined car with jagged rusted edges for a container of Pringles, which turns out to be a shared food weakness of theirs. She can't heal herself but Lena can keep her healthy and _heal for Jess_ so long is it's not too bad and Lena can find the food and hydration for her bone marrow to keep up the blood bag act.

Lena and Jess have a secret. It's time to share it.

Their first victory is a tiny creole town with a failing water pump. Jess needed shoes was how it started. Sunshine's people needed to know how to repair a 70-year-old sump pump in the town hall which was the only safe, tall, non-rottable building of stone and steel, the best place for the four families left to take shelter and like the rest of the town, only existed because the pump was keeping the swamp out of the foundations. The whole place was below sea level, surrounded by water and ringed by cypress trees. Far enough inland that hurricanes were an acceptable risk.

The town's existence was a fuck-you to the terrain it stood on before the war. Lena decided to save it the instant she realized that.

Nature wanted Sunshine gone. Mankind could keep it anyway.

Lena offered to take a look and they pointed their guns somewhere else.

The local Sherriff was white and if nuclear war wasn't an argument that white people were trouble, he was. Pulled people over for tickets, cash, and blowjobs. Hung nooses on trees when people complained.

Then the war meant that there was no _system._ Just one asshole. Radiation got him. That or a broken ankle and an alligator. Possibly a cottonmouth snake. Maybe he got his cock stuck in an airboat's propeller. Hard to say.

None of the menfolk admit which it was and each of the wives or girlfriends seem to like to hint that _theirs_ had done it. 

She was the only white person for miles and Jess had stayed back. A pack of little girls born after the event -- two mothers were blessed with triplets in the winters after -- played with Lena's hair while she was elbow-deep in the guts of the thing.

_'S'not curly, mama!'_

_'Ma, why's she so pale?'_

_'How come she's so short?'_

Lena took the last one personally. 

"It's because I'm a ghost!" she yelled, waving her arms and chasing them away.

They needed a book that covered hydraulics, basic electrician's work, and something that covered enough metallurgy that they could smelt down scrap to replace what would sooner or later break. Five books, she realized when she pulled them up. They sent parties out to find the paper armed with the promise that enough paper meant books for all and she gave them the location of the nearest cache, fifty miles off. Jess has contributed a devilishly clever index of books listed by what-went-wrong, instructions on the printer, and guides on what is and is not possible to make into paper.

The combination to the lock was theirs. Sunshine owned it now.

Sunshine, Lousiana, Population of thirty-eight humans, a handful of dogs treated like royalty, skinny chickens for food, and seemingly endless alligators, fish, and frogs. They lived on eggs, chicken, whatever swam past, and rice from farms still operating upriver. They kept themselves feeling sane by the dogs, interestingly. Keeping the dogs in food and love was their bright line. If they got tempted to eat the dogs, to trade loyalty, companionship, and their children's playmates for a few calories, they would abandon the town. That was their charter.

Man's best friend indeed.

Sunshine is now the most technologically advanced community in America. They even gave Lena an idea.

Shortwave. Shortwave and proper file compression could transmit books from her workstation to every operating Apocabook for hundreds of miles. No more shuttling cache to cache one she installs antennas.

She hugs Jess for twenty minutes when they work out that it can be done. They actually get drunk even though they probably could have bought the next town they visited with the stuff.

Lena is doing good.

Because Jack saved her.

She keeps naming cockroaches even though Jess complains.

* * *


	4. By Her Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kara learns the hard way humans are creatures of habit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lana Lang is typically the first significant love of Clark Kent's life (depending on the reboot) and in many cases ends up a professor in Metropolis.  
> \-----  
> Kryptonians don't necessarily have a strong sexual identity if they're not sexually active and Green Martians have a sexual identity that is essentially _sympathetic_ given their telepathy and shapeshifting. They might start out going down on a partner male and then some telepathically shared flash of fantasy shifts one or both partner's bodies to fit the fantasy.

**Kara - +5 years**

Practice helped. Kara has figured out why the gaps between Martian, Thangarian and human abilities and her own seemed so small. It was Oa, of course. A plague to split Kryptonians genetically so that no one being would ever have all the gifts that would eventually emerge.

Martians retained the most: flight, speed, strength but were made more susceptible to fire than even humans are.

Thangarians had the strength and biological affinity for Nth Metal but flew only with great difficulty with breakable, quickly-tired wings.

Humans were the most flexible of the three lost ones, if the most breakable. 

It took a full earth year, meditating in the outer layer of the sun.

She tried to use the martian powers and the sun nearly burned her. Thangarian abilities led to singed feathers and having to quickly right herself before falling to deep.

Then it clicked. Humans. Alex had talked through what she felt these powers might be like even though she didn't have them. Any of them. Alex could still imagine them, describe using them and how it would feel and so easily, fluidly, convincingly. Depowered, short-lived, imperfect and _highly varied_ human beings who had interbred with the last of the Lost Houses were the conductive tissues. 

She could shapeshift because she could imagine Alex's funny faces. She could find the wings and the metal in her skin, something purer and stronger than even Nth Metal, because she liked watching birds clean their feathers. 

Earth and Alex.

It was like Rao had put his hand on her shoulder, pointed at Earth and whispered...

"They've given you so much. Go say thanks." 

\-----

Alex did try to warn her. Humans have patterns. Deep ones.

She told Kara that if you drop from the sky with wings of white-hot metal and strike the slavers down with a swat of the fingers or take the shape of a guard and walk their pens in the dark of night slipping out-of-phase fingers to pick locks from the inside, you are not, can not, will never again be _just here to help_ and that they will feel they owe you something even if you say that they don't.

This is probably something Kal knew how to avoid...or just never ran into.

She ran into it face first. Discouraging it proved a disaster because then they made stuff up and decided the sacred truth was secret. One tribe went to war with another for disrespecting what they decided to call the Golden Woman. After the fire and skin color that comes with using the new hybrid form. Pure heat will tan Kara, even if the sun can't.

Kara had to separate two bands of survivors she had rescued a year before because they each thought the others were worshipping her wrong. Not the only time it happened, either.

Then Alex had to be an ass about it. Bowing and praying and speaking nonsense words. 

Eliza laughed, in a way she has when one of her girls is teasing the other and she's joining in so that it stays gentle and they all will laugh. 

Kara blames the rabbit potstickers. She will do until the sun swallows this rock.

> "So, you were staring pretty hard at that woman," she reminded Kara over the fire in the ruined mansion in Malibu that Kara flies them to to bed down.
> 
> "So? She was attractive!"
> 
> Alex snorted.
> 
> "Attractive. Attractive is the pre-war term. She was _hot_ Kara. She was full on four-Rs out there."
> 
> "What?"
> 
> "Revved up, ripe and ready to repopulate. You're not that different from me or mom, in your wants and needs. Which is why you're not scary when you go all terrible swift sword of heaven out there. Even if the only people more shy about sex than Americans are Kryptonians. You just wanted to dig a hole and pull her in it and rip those rags off and for her to have all your little babies. Admit it."
> 
> "I woudn't say no to a wife," Kara mumbled. "Someday. I wouldn't be easy to be with though. One thing is she has to be a good cook, if we're going to get along. More like she has to know _how._ Not that I wouldn't do it for her but I'd need to learn. I don't even know which plants on this planet are poisonous."
> 
> "Good cook, that was the first thought? How mid-fifties, Kara! You do realize that if you asked for that woman, asked them for _any woman_ as a thank you, they wouldn't even blink?"
> 
> "Alex! Stop!"
> 
> "What?" Alex laughed. "Your own damn fault I'm trying to get you laid. Someone wore out the last of our porn DVDs, vibrators are an extinct species and if the great savior gets some, maybe I can get _scraps_."
> 
> "God help me," Eliza had muttered.

The next time they saved a gaggle of random traders from slavers, Alex whipped off her dust mask, fired her rifle into the sky and demanded to speak to the leader.

"I am Alexandra Imperiosa, the chosen sword of the Golden Woman," Alex shouted to them. "For your salvation, she demands tribute!"

Kara was listening in and heard her across the planet. She hits and runs so she isn't too tempted to kill the disabled slavers by looking at the aftermath. Alex makes those hard choices because Alex understands better what special something makes a human and she can see when that spark has been swallowed forever.

By the time Kara had flown back -- slowed down by sheer embarrassment -- it was too late. Two young women, one short and brown and one long and pale still crisping in the desert sun were jockeying to be the prettiest and the best at cooking potstickers off a paper Alex must have folded up in her scarf.

Alex waited patiently and then picked Maggie who -- naturally -- was an ex-cop who liked guns and dancing and drunk dancing. She grabbed four bottles the next time they turned over a stash of beer, grabbed Alex, swayed and drank, passing the sweaty glass between them and dropping each bottle they shared when it was empty. Crunching it under their boots.

Now they're so disgustingly cute that maybe it was about Alex's needs all along.

Kara barely looked at Maggie. Lana was gorgeous. She was dirty but seemed untouched somehow. Like one bath would make her whatever she had been before. Her red hair was short and messy and long enough, just barely, to hide fingers in. She was leggy and bursting with energy, always wanting to move, like a deer or a wild horse. She also didn't seem scared. She was smiling. She knew this wasn't swapping one slave trader for another. She knew at least part of it was a game. 

Kara had a choice. She could yell at Alex and say it was all a joke -- which with her luck would probably spin out into a religious war -- and maybe Lana would burst into tears. Or she could share lunch with someone who was not Alex or Eliza.

At the time, it seemed like an easy call.

Then Lana suggested a base of operations.

Then Kara found a large Mesa in northern Mexico that would produce large outflows of water if a fast enough, small enough object struck an aquifer a hundred miles away from below. A place made secure by desert but one that could be made lush and damp if someone -- someone who could only be Kara -- willed it.

Kara's not sure exactly where it fell apart. 

The point of no return wasn't Lana organizing the first 'blessing of the waters' where she led the crowd in prayer as the impact of Kara's fist on the bedrock sent water rushing up and somehow timed it so that Kara's reappearance was just before the water rushed out. They switched their timing so that a still red-hot, magma-dripping Kara doesn't get a faceful of icy water and end up in a cloud of steam.

No return was some point _after_ that and it was no doubt Lana's idea but probably Kara's fault because Lana doesn't force. She suggests.

Kara putting up a few scrap-metal row-houses or Lana offering more houses in exchange for scouts and spies or Kara not putting a stop to that and letting it become a full-sized city or Lana suggesting that holding audiences with Kara winged out, on fire, hovering cross-legged over the throne would intimidate the remaining enemies and settle disputes or Kara not telling Lana that was crazy and throwing her on the bed and sucking the idea right out of her or when Lana asked if they could bring 'that cute blonde from the scribes' into bed and then proceeded to push her head between Kara's legs and growl 'worship her!' or when she rolled over one night, threw her arm over Kara and the cute blonde scribe and said:

_'You know what would really scare them? A cute little baby goddess!'_

Kara should have definitely stopped it there. She definitely should not have climbed on top of Lana, bit her ear, rifled through Lana's brain for what kind of men she found hot and shapeshifted.

Never trust a woman with a potsticker in her hand, that's what she's going to tell the kids.

* * *

**Kara - +7 years (present day)**

Kara starts every day the same way lately. 

Sideways. Squashed. Lana's pregnant belly rested on her cheek. This started as a simple enough idea. The child, who Lana named Nyssa, is Kryptonian and one very good source of sunlight, safely filtered and well-matched to her physiology is Kara's skin. 

That or Lana wanted Kara to hold her on her lap for hours and glow so Alex made up the whole thing. That's less likely because faking those charts would require getting out of bed and Maggie really hates it when Alex leaves the pile of sheepskin for any reason than to use the bathroom, change sheets or bring food back to Maggie. Especially lately with the slavers cowed across the hemisphere and less and less 'murder wife stuff' for them to do in the dark, unsafe places Kara can't stand to look at.

"Lana," she grumbles, patting blindly to try to hold hands and ending up with a boob. "Move the baby."

"Hmm?" Lana coos. "She just wants some sunshine..."

Kara groans. 

"Should never have shapeshifted during sex with you," Kara grumbles.

"Shush. You had fun. She's waiting, Golden Woman."

She will do anything for Lana and Lana knows it too, so using the god-name is really a low blow.

Humming the lullabies she is practicing, Kara lets solar radiation waft from her skin into the great, stretched swell of belly and baby above her.

"Feels nice," Lana breathes.

"Sure this is about the _baby_?" Kara jokes.

"Hey, I am just the evil genius slash enabler slash high priestess who set all this up. You're the irritable goddess who snatches whatever she wants from downstairs and tosses it in here."

"Those are sandwiches you're talking about, Lana. Well, and Jenna."

"And Corrine. And Jason. And...shoot. Forget."

"Amelia," Kara fills in. "You're the one who brings Corrine and Jason. Remind me whose idea the _sacred harem w_ as?"

"You were doing a lot of raids," Lana sniffs. "I got cold in here. Besides, demanding virgins it's a great way to humiliate enemies, make treaties, and influence people. That should be my book's title. Also, it's not like we haven't just punted most of them to other jobs. Everyone's a winner."

"Right. Everyone starts in the sex den and moves up. Just let me know when the baby is fed and the mama's had her orgasm..."

"Kara!" Lana had probably meant to _shout it_ but she barely had enough to _gasp it_ after spending so much time absorbing Kara's energy _and_ the baby's affinity for the energy. The baby needs it for food but after the six-month mark, Lana's body seems to need it just as much but for decidedly different reasons.

"Hmm. Must be _rain_ I feel oozing down my neck."

Hands land on Kara's shoulders and Lana's hips start rocking, dragging the silk-wrapped dampness of her pussy across Kara's throat.

"Fine. Shut up and let me grind," Lana grits out. "We have an audience this morning."

\-----

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have a lot of comics knowledge of Lana. She's usually a minor figure. I just decided that she was capital-T trouble here, sexually bold and generally ruthless, the sort of person who would flash someone for a free beer or flirt with someone to get their motel room keys and then lock them out so she could eat Snickers in the minibar. Would take the slightest excuse to name herself High Priestess of the Golden One partly to have nice things and maybe mostly to tease Kara.
> 
> I thought it would be a hilarious pairing for shy, nervous Kara to have this sarcastic, self-promoting, scheming, sexually insatiable lunatic on her hands.


	5. Lazy Mornings, Legal Codes, Distress Signals and and Trend Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lana does the mean stuff and Kara does the feely stuff, Alex and Maggie are generals and wives and Eliza is bound and determined to provide comprehensive woman's healthcare to the last woman on Earth.

**Kara**

The audience is, as usual lately, short and simple. Lana and her have a dance. All approach the seat -- Kara has forbidden the word throne -- the same way, while Kara drifts above it, out of reach, wings unfurled, metal-coated skin glowing with raw heat.  
  
If it's an ambassador, or a raider king demanding tribute, Kara lets Lana lead. If a challenge is issued, Lana lays out, icily, what Kara will do to him, his genitals, his sons, his goats, his goat's genitals, etc. while Kara just drifts above him, putting out enough extra energy for the radiant heat to sting.

When it is a dispute in the city, or between people, Kara has made it clear that _she_ handles those. She cools, lowers the light show, and flies lazily, like she was swimming in air, to the speaker.

Today, there is only one. Two neighbors, one whose cart had accidentally killed the dog of the other. Sloppy. The girl made sure the livestock gates were down but he didn't check the roads in their section. 

The little girl was out for blood because she was hurting. She did everything right and he was in a hurry and her dog was dead. 

Lana would have given her anger its satisfaction, Kara knows. Not the man's head. Lana is always subtler and at least _mostly_ nicer than that. She would have either done something punitive financially or a mild fine plus something demeaning like cleaning shit from the kennels so that ten years from now the girl would either owe her a favor or just _like her_ when it came up. The building of resources and future favors, always building up favors owed for the Seat, spending only when she must for honor's sake. Kara's almost positive Lana doesn't know that is her pattern. 

Lana organizes and gathers and hoards and pays the bills. Kara, in this strange faux goddess role she is trapped in, is the reason the place exists.

Reasons have different responsibilities than hoarders. 

Kara listened to the little girl, descended -- trying not to bawl in a very non-godlike way -- and put her hand on her shoulder.

She only questioned the girl.

What was the beast's name? Did she want to pray for it? Did the girl want another dog, someday, when she was ready?

Sneezes (adorable). Yes (happy to play along). Maybe, when she wasn't so sad (Kara has every idea what survivor's guilt is like).

Kara kissed the girl's forehead, took flight and without a glance, told the other man he owed the girl's family the coin for the dog breeder's fees and the cost of food for the pup from adoption to death which she stressed would be of old age.

Less than half a livestock death fine and paid out over years.

The girl sniffs out a thank you.

\-----

"There is no more today," Kara decides before Lana can scan the crowd again. "Life is life, for you, for beasts, even for me. The ending of it is a somber thing to remind us and for all of us to respect. I'll not hear taxation requests barked out over the sound of a child in pain."

"The three of you who did not arrive by the deadline are welcomed when you return day after tomorrow."

Lana nods.

"Audience is ended," she declares in a commanding, cavern-filling voice.

_Power-hungry priestess Lana is one of the sexy Lanas._

"Be well."

Kara drifts down beside Lana, putting a hand to the sheet of muslin hanging close to her stretched, sore belly. Her palm sends light in and the child answers from Lana's womb, unmistakable. Call and response. She does this before the supplicants leave. For two reasons. Because she wants to touch Lana. Because of Lana's shivers and smiles. 

Anyone who might wish to be foolish in the dead of night in Lana's bedchambers must first wonder how one woman, who has known no man, is fat and waddling with another woman's child. If Kara is a false god, where did the child come from, after all? Alex's idea. One more layer on top of her patrols, her and Maggie's hand-picked killers on watch, and six hundred feet of rock from the ground the royal bedrooms opened only to herself, Eliza, Maggie and Alex passable to servants, council members, everyone else only way of a wide-throated hallway capped with a twenty-foot, three-hundred-ton sandstone door closed by Kara herelf without fail at dusk.

"Hello, my girls."

Lana leans into the praise. Sags, really. Her feet have been bothering her.

"Small council, love?"

"Might as well," Lana sighs. "Perhaps Winn has invented a new kind of trade trick that will work when we use money for that or he's invented a new sort of crop that _when we have it_ it will be good to know if the yield to loss is enough."

"Perhaps. He means well. His skills _will_ come in handy, more and more as time goes on. You can build starting in the dirt. Winn can build starting on top of bricks. You..."

She kisses Lana's head.

"...are..."

Again.

"...not..."

Again.

"To stress yourself about that when the baby comes. He's not trying to replace you. Rao's mercy. He's just _Winn_ is the problem. Impatient to get started, that's all."

"I know. When I stop and think about it, I know that's why He's just so..."

Lana pulls a face.

"...so eager."

"Was someone not excited about three-times-a-week audiences and gushing between her thighs about using showy displays of water distribution as propaganda?"

"Hmm. No idea who _that might be_ ," Lana shoots back.

"Shame. I'd have liked to kiss her," Kara muses.

In the hallways, she lets the heat fade but doesn't pull in the wings. The wings she keeps out more and more, she finds. Children tickle them when she walks the crowds. Sometimes she can snag a grape.

"I don't want you to be so aggressive with them, beloved. They have next to nothing."

Lana sighs.

"Which is the problem. What I could use to motivate or punish are luxuries, which we usually don't have. Needs, you provide. Without some softer sort of leverage, a prison and maybe an executioner are a matter when, not if, Kara."

Kara chuckles.

"Should we perhaps simply write a legal code, dear? At least have it ready? So that when there's enough stability for it to matter, it's ready."

"You just want to spend more time with Amelia and her fingers," Lana complains.

"Lana..."

Kara sighs. "Jealousy is not your color. And until quite recently, it wasn't you at all. Has something changed? The baby? Do you think I will ignore you after the baby comes?"

Lana nods quicker than she can catch herself. Kara opens her arms.

"Never. Your goddess commands from on high that she comfort you."

Lana snickers even as she buries herself deep in the hug.

"I want the code because it would be simpler. So it was just _decided_ and so you wouldn't have to hear about things like that, Lana. You're softer than you let yourself know."

"As for Amelia? Yes, we should definitely do most of the work on the legal code in bed. With her _fingers._ I just want to spend more time with _both of you,_ Lana. All three of you, when Nyssa comes."

Lana's smile is thin. Kara presses her lips to Lana's forehead.

"I love you."

The smile is less thin now.

"I've heard rumors about that. Again, please."

Another kiss.

Now the smile is the right size.

Lana is not a bad person, even if she seems to think that Kara thinks she is. 

She's proved that to Kara in sometimes expected, sometimes surprising, sometimes terrifying ways. All things equal or with all choices some sort of good, Lana is good. Without fail. When a gamble can be made for great rather than just good, her cunning makes her better than Kara at knowing whether or not to try.

The woman who was silently trying to figure out how to advantage Kara and by extension herself optimally over a dead dog would _never_ have killed it herself. She has taken in starving pups every time she spots one, three of them this winter. Bawling in Kara's arms when one passed, too small and too close to take the milk in time. Once stepped in front of a cart _on the odds_ that the driver would rather not run down the High Priestess he could see in her bumblebee-yellow, wind-whipped robes and giving the boy time to retrieve the small black kitten the cart driver could not see.

Now that Lana's pregnant, Kara just forbade carts on residential lanes through the spring. She's not rolling that handful of dice with her pet-crazy wife again.

_Actually, I could probably let her do all the non-cat and non-dog disputes,_ Kara realizes, laughing softly into Lana's hair.

"Making fun of me?" Lana sniffs. "Your messy, weepy, fat priestess?"

"No," Kara replies, winding the hug tight as Lana's skeleton can take. "Just realized that the dog cases and the cat cases are your weak spot. You can do all the dead sheep and cow thief cases, deal?"

"Deal."

She just doesn't _work_ like Kara does. Kara sometimes feels like love leaks out of Lana faster than she can get more in.

Eliza had a way of describing it, something about insecurity and poor parenting that made Lana less able than Alex or Kara to trust people, even less so than Maggie who has every reason not to ever trust anyone again after her father dumped her on a road frequented by traffickers, drug-runners and predators. Kara wasn't happy to hear it but she's not sure it's wrong, either. 

Kara trusts love, Eliza said. Assumes it. Lana loves, she feels and enjoys love, but it fades sooner for her. She needs to freshen it over and over. After an afternoon nap, Kara wakes up and drinks the smell of the gap where Lana was lying, bathes, and then goes looking. Only worries if it's nightfall and she hasn't returned. Lana can't handle that, right now, not even in the afternoon nap. She would probably cry, especially now, with the pregnancy, if Kara ever left the bed first in the morning.

So Kara verifies Lana, over and over. Agrees with Lana. 

Their baby grows.

Their city grows.

Thirty thousand people have their _needs_ of water, food, crops, and safety below this pillar of red rock because _Kara_ can bring water and she can cut ridges in the mesa with her vision and hang scrap steel from dead cities for row crops and as frames for vines, spiraling all around the outside of the tower. She can watch from the spire as herders drive sheep a hundred miles and back, making sure that distance does not become an opportunity.

Her legend is worth armies. 

Those same people have luxuries, sometimes, because _Lana_ can press a trader's mistake in terms into a favorable bargain more menacingly than Alex presses a knife to the neck of an intruder.

\-----

Winn has not, in fact, invented a new plant out of nothing.

Worse.

He invented a unified method for determining trend lines on crops, taxes, fuel supplies, water levels...anything where something has to go out, something has to go in and other factors make it complicated but in the end, it has to replenish or ideally, grow. It can be done on paper whereas most human methods had long switched to computers. Of which they have one. Which is currently walking in circles and muttering in Kandoori in Kara's workshop.

Kara is amazed but she nods, rather than squeals because Lana is fragile and truly not herself, with the baby close. It's not fair to put more on her by praising Winn too loudly in front of others. Kara can assign more staff to Winn's project quietly, in writing, later.

By the time he's done, Lana looks ready to give birth from sheer boredom.

Construction guild is lead by a rock-shaped man named Roger Martinez, reports a loose girder which risks sending a currently-anchored wheat crop dropping onto houses. Peeling at the outside. Something only Kara can fix. They pick a time.

Mechanical guild reports that they've found wrecks that give them a surplus in long-endurance car parts. 

Ella Hughes is as usual, ahead and under budget and it looks like she is just about to ask permission to finish building her pet project. It's a ridiculously oversized armored crawler, cobbled from clearly experimental parts scavenged at White Sands, Los Alamos and the Area 51 when Eliza distracts her with a different obsession: her wife painting studio. Kara has had to pull Ella off the ladder before to prevent midnight, unauthorized, high energy tinkering. She's not sure that the one part from Area 51 isn't part of that alien everyone was so worked up about being stored there and at any rate, it's fifty unrelated projects each with a narrow focus but well ahead of what had been cutting edge Earth military tech that Ella's somehow strung together into one conglomerated thing that _should be_ light years ahead of what had been. That is, assuming that the fusion bottle developed independently for the electric engines and the magnetically repositionable armor are actually compatible with each other and that the railguns power conduits won't mix in some nasty way with both _._

It terrifies Kara what Ella could get up to if the screws, nuts, gaskets, hoses, axles and engines she were given were ever _meant_ to be used together. Kara is probably lucky Ella is married. She's cute and the last thing Ella needs is more influence over Kara's good judgment.

"Anything else?"

Eliza shakes her head.

"Healing guild trods along, as always. Blood donations are up, thankfully, since the ice failed on one batch. Five stubborn cases but nothing my healers can do until the next crops. We have the beakers and the chemists, just not the plants. Foxglove, in particular. I've three patients who will give birth before we have a crop and I can't take old man Johannson off the stuff because he will die and the women won't, or it's a long long chance. One child I doubt will live. The other two, the mother can't afford and in one case, the husband is unfit. I presume the seat will assist with burials or placements?"

Kara nods. She glances to Ameila.

"Any farm hands the healer's guild needs, give them."

"Of course, Golden _._ "

Some of the council, those who Kara isn't close to, rankle and fidget at the break in decorum. One looks ready to demand a flogging. Which would require a vote on legalizing flogging.

Ameila has learned, in the same way Lana did, panting and naked, that Golden is endearing to Kara. Their golden. Their treasure. As for the title? Simply forgot a word. It is the Golden Seat, after all.

"We will aid the mothers here in any way and at any time. A listener's ear, as well. To give up a child..."

_Like Alura had to..._

Eliza who carries the full story, more than anyone, nods. Lana knows Kara isn't divine but Kara isn't sure Krypton really _stuck_ for her as it did for Eliza and Alex. Superman is less well-remembered than the names of some of the 'battles' of the War which ended up little more than setting which group of soldiers puked their irradiated guts out on the ship and which made landfall first.

"The patients will have to hold on. Fevers, largely. I've been able to work with ordinary opium for the time being. Far better than nothing for a surgery."

Kara smiles. Eliza doesn't credit herself enough for it but she's provided more consistent, quick care for this small group of humans in a more even and predictable way than they would have had on the American healthcare market and done so with EMT trainees, first-aid class graduates and a handful of teenagers that she taught herself. One doctor, two nurses, three retired nurses, scalpels and tools Kara heat-visioned for them and the drugs that can be made from plants. The first guild was the Healer's Guild because it did a disservice to Eliza and her people to act as if degrees were more important than skill, Eliza said. A guild was the pre-industrial term, Eliza explained and it translated perfectly to the word Krypton used for people who shared one common calling. Guild it was.

"Amazed, as always. My terrifying and wicked Imperiosas?"

Martinez scoffs. Alex and Maggie had been heart-eyeing each other the whole time.

Alex shakes her head. 

"North and west are quiet. Scouts report that raiders turned tail at the Columbia River. Slavers haven't tried to land again since Big Sur."

"Imperiosa Margarita?

Maggie flips through her notes.

"South is fine. Two signal flares out of sequence to the east. Orange-whites. Both at the six-hundred-mile range but not at a relay hill or installation. Texas. Spotters and telescopes caught them."

"Tell me more."

"Not much more to tell, yet. A distress flare, but an outdated mix. Probably captured."

Kara clicks her tongue.

"But no all clear?"

"No. So either a patrol unit in trouble, or capture and escape or for any reason had to scrounge for equipment, or someone shooting what they thought were fireworks, or a trap. Given that those were packed, stored, and distributed in threes, I think a patrol unit is a strong possibility. Someone unfamiliar with the system would have shot more. Made a bigger gesture."

"So it's possible that we have our soldiers still under fire?"

Maggie nods.

"It wasn't an _ancient_ mixture. The one we retired over the summer. Too much magnesium. Any soldier would have known that and..."

"...only risked it if desperate," Kara agrees. "Volatile. Tom lost an arm to that stuff. The Mesa nearly lost a good fighter."

Alex holds up her hand.

"Let's be careful here. If it is a trap, then what?"

"We send soldiers," Maggie replies. "A fast column, or at least scouts."

Kara shakes her head.

"If it's a trap, they're after the Golden Woman herself. They'd be expecting any reinforcements they attacked to signal with more of the same, drawing more attention, more reinforcements. Drawing me. They know where that game would end and no sense in playing for extra rounds to make me mad first. The Destroyer is dead, after all."

Lex Luthor lost the right to a human name when he destroyed the human race. Kara can't imagine anyone else who know's she's Kryptonian, let alone wants to fight her because of it.

"Fuck," Alex realizes. "You're right."

"Let's assume an ordinary situation. Unit under fire, hunkered down, clear line to the sky. Send a column. Fast, hard, mean. Grab them and come home. When you get back, we can decide if we need to make any examples of someone or prevent any creative projects."

Maggie nods.

"We'll lead it ourselves."

Kara reaches into her robe and pulls out three chips from her bracelet. The Fortress self-destructed when Kal died, or tried to and only failed because some of the artifacts had self-preservation instincts. Kryptonian tech and anything like it is so scarce she has to loan it to her own damn family.

"Report in. Hourly."

* * *

**THE PREVIOUS NIGHT**

* * *

Jess ducks under the fence before the wild spray of machine-gun fire rakes the tree she had been hiding on before her sprint.

"Fuckfuckfuckfuck."

Whoever this is wanted Lena and they knew she was special. This means they came straight at Jess, who she would protect, took Lena and then disappeared. The men behind her are part of a ghoulish repopulation movement that tries to ensure each man has three women pregnant at all times but that group hasn't got the brains -- or the balls, much as they lie to themselves -- to make a play _here,_ south and west where the rumors about the Golden Spire are all that people talk about around the bar as the moonshine blinds them. The place that no one knows much about except that they're trying to _get there_ or no one is stupid enough to steal _from there_ or if you _piss them off_ you're no son of mine.

Formidable, presumably. 

Sons of Adam are fronting for someone willing to run them, and her, into whatever lunatic warlord's meat grinder as long as they get Lena first. Probably dropped a tip about a lesbian and a bisexual wandering the road together. Red meat for these perverts.

"Here, little bitchy little bitchy!"

Jess checks her pack.

Eighteen rounds for the pistol. Nine shotgun shells, solid sabot rounds. Hand grenade. For Lena, enough to walk out of this bathed in blood both hers and theirs and grinning. For her, not even enough to die in an artistically pleasing way.

Flares.

She's seen these used. There's one militia group that uses flares very distinctly. Color-coded, paired signals. It's almost like passwords. They know what they mean and that's the point. The flare by itself is useless.

_Think. Think. Think!_

"Lena and I were headed to Round Rock, like we do for Tuyet each year. Motorcycle scouts. Ambush. We were far out, binocs, logging the interaction, just like always. One guy was wounded..."

Jess flips through the bandolier of flares.

"Orange. His partner sent up orange and smeared his hands with it. The sniper must have seen it because he put the safety on. It's just ink but they held back. Why? What were they afraid of?"

She closes her eyes and tries not to think about the probing gunfire. 

Tries to remember the whole incident, guess the meaning. The bleeding stopped. The partner laid down a fresh round of suppressing fire. They used a couple heavy grenades. The raiders slunk back. They then sent up a blue and white flare. Not green, not the _obvious_ all-clear signal. In fact, in almost thirty slender, carefully packed shells there _isn't_ a green. Orange, orange-white stripe, blue, white, blue-white stripe, blue, purple, purple-white...everything but a solid red and a solid green. Whoever made these is too clever for that.

She pulls one of each color out, pulls two of a few more and grinds them into the dirt. Taking out all of the blue would give them a clue.

Three orange flares, one gun. There's a storm sewer behind her.

"Well Jess, this wouldn't be the _dumbest_ thing you've ever done with someone who didn't think you were really a lesbian with the right guy."

She cracks the pigment canister, smears it on her hands, face, breasts and between her legs, acting on a hunch.

_Clear line of sight to the sky...one...two...three._

The flare kicks like a mule and burns hot, scalding her hand through the flaregun. It leaves a long, orange and white smear in the night sky farther than her eyes can follow and the light just hovers, no doubt on a parachute, lingering over the scrubby woods.

"Fuck!" one of the gunmen hollers.

Jess stuffs a protein bar in her mouth, slings the flare pack as far as she can into the sewer, and tucks her backpack inside.

"I'm coming out!" she calls.

She holds her hands high.

"I'm guessing that you boys know what this means," she bellows.

She points one stained hand at the other.

"If you touch me, the Golden Spire's going to hear of it."

It's a bald ass guess. The Spire is well known but not known at the same time. It's nebulous. Either no survivors, or it's paradise and no one wants to leave, or it looks like paradise and they get used as lab rats, whatever. That exchange she watched might be their militia or it might be some other formidable group that has the unmarked, terrain-coded uniforms and the Spire is that other large, well-armed outfit with the uniforms with the Greek symbols. Could go either way and it's a coin toss.

"Kill me, they're going to find the body. They're going to start hunting for hands with ink on them. Starting from right where I'm standing. Last I checked, no one gets away!"

The ringleader is always close, always close enough to the knuckledraggers to keep some semblance of order.

"Weapons down, boys. Just have to be _gentle_ with this one," he chuckles. "Family squabble, they'll understand."

The man that emerges is not even as old as the douchy frat boys she used to scold in the library at A&M and he's already this _monster_ who sees pussy, ass and mouth on-demand as his God-given right. She longs for the days when those boys tucked tail and ran when she shushed them.

"No, you have to stay hands all way the fuck off, asshole."

Jess pulls her shirt down, showing the same orange stain on her breast.

"Lid pops when jar is opened. This stuff doesn't wash off either."

_Right? I hope?_

"Well just get the all-clear flare."

"Be my guest. Which one is it?"

"Green, cocksleeve. It's always green."

"You sure? I didn't see a green in the kit. Your funeral. But don't worry, I'll make sure to comfort your wife."

"Yum," she adds with a waggle of the tongue.

Provoking them is either going to get her killed or force the whole thing to happen faster -- release, a prisoner swap, whatever -- and neither of those are bad, in this particular shit sandwich. 

Lena talks like this. Straight on, no fear, no common sense, and she lives...usually doesn't even get shot.

This works for Lena. It'll have to do.

That's how Jess ends up bound, gagged, pissed as hell but unbruised and unraped in the back of a truck with six women who look like they were far less lucky. The others aren't gagged though. One of them is a petite mullato with red, wiry hair who wiggles over in the truck bed and lowers Jess' gag before turning around -- while hogtied, impressive -- and looking Jess in the eyes.

"Honey, did you threaten to eat out his wife?" her new friend teases.

"No," Jess lies.

"Well you got nice minty breath so that ain't why he wants your mouth shut. I'm Pam. My first time too."

"Jess."

Pam smiles, replaces the gag and blows Jess a kiss.

Pam is either fucking nuts, a dangerously unhinged and self-destructive nymphomaniac, an escaped Oscar winner who acts like she's not pissing herself or, maybe, just just, just maybe, she has her own plan. If so, the perfect partner in this escape. The problem is that only Pam knows which.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Foxglove can be used to distill digoxin, which can be used to treat heart failure (though other, newer drugs are preferred) or to induce abortions.  
> \-----  
> A system of airborne flares placed on hills and other high ground, predetermined locations, combined with telescopes, could be used to provide basically speed-of-light communication over a wide are as long as line of sight existed. If paired with teams of spotters looking over a wider area with weaker telescopes, it could be incredibly effective for a low tech nation's military. 
> 
> Given that a nuclear war would have likely caused at least some EMP pulses, destroying human-built radio and telephone lines, power lines, and so on. The internet, the power grid and things like it and so on probably survive but only in small pockets, with no guarantee that they go where you need them.
> 
> Seven years in a lack of replacement parts would gut modern computing, which while highly redundant in the large sense, does assume workers fixing things and replacement laptops and iPads and servers being made.


	6. Poke and Prod

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the first post-war queer women's scavenger hunt has its first annual event.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Spire's edge over the other -- often larger -- settlements or militaries is primarily organization. They train, they have rules, they have drills. They issue gear they know to work and maintain it to a set standard, sizing their force to what they can equip rather than throwing ill-equipped cannon fodder at the enemy. The soldiers and spies are paid in money, not pillage and given bonuses or fined for their ability to be professional. 
> 
> Things like the logbooks, color-coded signal cards, flares, telescopes, scheduled check-ins, etc. are all ways of turning relatively simple tech into power by way of knowledge and patterns.
> 
> Raiding bands might have someone in charge of gasoline, keeping cans filled, watching levels, and so on. Spire fuelmasters and their trucks have numbered cans and each truck has a logbook in a lockbox listing which cans it was carrying. An attacked shipment can be traced to a thief by a spy reporting a stamped can or a traitor can be found by which can returns empty and who was on duty to distribute it.
> 
> They are behaving as an organized, industrialized outfit.
> 
> The remaining truly high-tech and alien-made equipment has a shallow of spare parts, barely enough to support Alex, Maggie, Kara and Lana using it.

**Alex - +7 years**

Maggie throttles the post-war mess of a moped she's riding to a stop beside her.

"It's just some woods," Maggie decides, lifting her visor and looking around. 

"Just woods," Alex agrees.

The team ditched the Spire-provided bikes at the last depot thirty miles back, in the covered garage on their side of the border. For now, they are wanderers. Ordinary. Riding bikes that can be had for pre-war beer, canned food, or a quick lay depending on purchaser and seller.

There's no mistaking the pair of blood-red, heat-scorched look of the lowered, fully-shelled bikes Kara and Ella created for them. Kara can repair the off-world tech involved, namely engines, frame and hull. She's confident. Ella is far less sanguine that the mechanic's guild can replace the computers, sensors and so on that replaced the gutted-out parts the US military took. They've ridden them only in combat and even then, only at the head of a column of two hundred going against an armored convoy five times their number.

After that, the mere appearance of the bikes themselves became a threatening gesture. Someone in the slavers band must have escaped because they earned a name. 

The Devil's Horns.

Someday, that ghost story will be useful. Today, when they will likely need to question locals? It would only scare the cattle.

Alex drops her kickstand. Maggie holds up her right glove, flicking the red card from the pouch in her palm out into view. The team dismounts.

"Fan out," Maggie calls back to the team. "We find the flare, we go from there."

"Imperiosa. You hear her!" Jameson tells the other two dozen or so.

Jameson and Demos are both ex-National City PD and known to Maggie from her work with the San Francisco police. They form the backbone of the group along with a creative, truly vicious gang thug named Vasquez who had a soldier inside her the whole damn time, just looking for the stability of three squares and decent sleep.

The sun is high and punishing, especially in armor, making Alex almost long for the cold of the nuclear winter.

Vasquez falls in with Maggie and Demos with her. That vow wasn't on the altar, it was later on their wedding day.

_'My best, always, to keep you safe'._

"Thoughts, Demos?"

He looks up from the dead leaves he was musing over and spanks his gloves.

"No roads. But the map we have of Waco, what's left of it, says the water supply came from the southeast."

"I'm assuming that has meaning, soldier."

"Yes, ma'am. We're uphill and up-river from where Waco _was_ back when."

He turns in a half-circle, pointing out at nothing.

"What?"

"Exactly. What? It's just woods. So where is the river? Where did a town that size get water and why aren't we watching it flow right past us? The next-highest hill is sixty miles away and ten feet shorter, and we know the river there is on a built-up spot. But it's barely a creek. Not enough, now or then, not by itself."

_Rivers flow downhill._

"Demos. Do we have any blasting charges with us?"

"Two, ma'am."

"Have the men rig up some probes. There's something _under_ us that we need to find and breach."

Demos' half-smile grows nasty.

"Got just the thing. Scavenged it last time we were about."

He pulls out a rag-padded lump and unwinds the cloth around what looks like a fucking whaling ship harpoon. The tip is attached to less than a foot of steel shaft, cut neatly with a circular saw.

"That'll do," Alex laughs.

They set up a grid and start poking. The sun moves. Water is drunk. Food is eaten. Shade from natural sources isn't an option so they rig up blankets between two trees to prevent heatstroke.

At some point in the process of poking the soil, Maggie turns up the flare's upper casing, still attached to the scraps of burned-away silk.

"May mix date, third batch," she reads to Alex. "Either shell twenty-three or twenty-eight. I'll call it in."

She places the comm chip Kara gave her on her palm and taps it. A rotating holograph of an obscured face appears.

"Team to Spire, over."

The holographic face moves, turning to track Maggie.

"This is Spire, authenticate."

Kara answered -- always in the mood for a mystery -- and she could hear the minuscule differences between Maggie's voice and a recording or a fake but Alex is glad that Kara's following rules.

Motherhood has changed her.

"Kandoor's sunset, with Daxam behind."

"Argo's dawn, with Rao above. Proceed."

"We've recovered the shell. May. Batch three, shell is either twenty-three or twenty-eight. Is it in the logs?"

The reply is a woman's sleep-scratchy voice saying something darker, sexier, and more brainless than nonsense.

"Ames," Kara prods. "Do we have a quartermaster's log?"

"Table over there," Ameilia grunts. "Drawer," she adds with a yawn. "She's soft..."

Lana's low smoky, slightly unsettling laughter blends with the slamming of drawers and rustling of papers.

Pages flip. Maggie makes a gesture to someone about changing the grid as they probe the dirt.

"Got the book. So looks like Charlie Company had that. But they came back fully equipped," Kara mutters. "Wait, wasn't...wasn't Tom in Charlie?"

"Yeah," Alex replies. "He got hurt...so we told them to risk it. Better to be silent than to have your gear explode on you. They dropped the flares and floored it to get back inside the border before nightfall. Anyone could have picked them up."

Kara sighs.

"Except someone didn't just grab them. The odds of someone picking a full pack flares, shooting off _just_ a distress flare, randomly? Just one. If they liked orange, use them up. Make more pretty colors. If they liked noise, same thing. If they wanted to see what we'd do, actually try to hack it, they'd hand nine guys one flare each and fan out. But no follow up?"

"It's odd," Alex agrees. "The situation matches need help, no all-clear except there's _no one here._ No bodies, no burn marks, nothing. Shell casings by the boot full but no pattern. Beer bottles too. Looks like rednecks used the area for target shooting back when. But it still seems reasonable to assume someone knew or guessed the meaning. If I had been tailing one of our units, observing them, and I worked it out, I'd know what it meant. It's not impossible for a stubborn or stealthy scout to crack our system given enough time in constant shadowing. Not by any stretch. It's why we have a roll-over ready." 

Alex loses her own train of thought at that point. Nothing here makes much sense.

"But then you wouldn't be asking for help," Kara reminds her. "You'd be ambushing us. So that's not it. You guys are good but you can't return fire silently so I'm going with you are not being ambushed right now. It...hmm...I wonder...hang on. I'll just check using..."

Alex can practically see Kara playing with the antique eyeglasses they found in the ruins of Midvale as she opens her senses to check from the Spire.

"Alex! Concrete channel. Looks like an artificial river."

_Six hundred miles away, two hundred feet of rock at least in line of sight. That just defeated the entire purpose of my morning._

"Where?"

"Six steps back...stop. You're right on top of it. Big enough to walk through, maybe two at a time."

"This would be easier if you came with," Maggie teases. "Much easier."

She snaps her fingers crisply, beckons to Demos and points. He pushes slow until his harpoon _thunks!_ against a solid barrier.

"Dig it out and blow it open, boys. Thanks, Kara."

"You would have found it on your own."

"Yeah, I know. Just don't want you two to miss the birth."

\-----

From there, it gets less and less clear. The channel is cracked neatly by the charge, sending them downhill until they hit a storm sewer grate. 

Tucked inside that, Vasquez finds a traveler's pack and Alex quite literally steps on the flare pack.

"One used up slot each," Demos notices. "But they only shot the one."

It's too damn late to figure out what their boogeyman is telling them now. They can't rely on sunlight to read the notebooks in the pack any longer and batteries are scarer than ammunition right now.

"Check that we have enough air, hole up in the tunnel and set some tripwires, guys. We'll start again tomorrow."

Maggie curls into Alex as soon as she snuffs the candle.

"Sleep well."

\-----

The traveler's pack is presumably their flare-shooter's and is now their main lead. So they spread out the contents on a tarp.

"Books, protein bars, water, high school physics textbook with carpentry textbook pages stuffed in it, more books, paperback novel, notebooks, shortwave radio with no mic..." Demos mutters. "Gun oil but no ammo or weapons. That's probably just because they buried them or the weapons were taken. Wallet. Couple pictures in it. Who still carries a _wallet_? Feels like a tinkerer type of person but whoever it was, this was one odd duck."

"What do we know?" Alex asks.

"Work it like a case," Maggie reminds the team. That combined with Demos and Jameson actually knowing police work as well as Maggie, and Vasquez' eagle eye for detail, turn this ragtag outfit into something close to a homicide detective team in investigative chops. "Everybody show everything to somebody else for a second look."

"Little medical thingy," he adds, shaking a crinkly, plastic-wrapped package. "Not sure what."

"Toss it," Maggie tells him.

He does and she catches it.

"Huh," Maggie chuckles. 

She passes it to Alex.

"What?"

"Our ghost is gay. Dental dams. Two used, four left. Properly sealed too."

"What now?"

"Right, they're like a condom for when you..."

She puts her tongue between her finger and waggles.

"You do realize I wasn't that old when the war started?" Alex grumbles. "Did have time to put that in my wallet for high school prom."

Maggie throws her arm around Alex.

"I know, I'm such a cradle robber."

"Three fucking years, Maggie. At most."

The soldiers just chuckle at them. This is _their_ team. The unspoken rule is that they don't have to listen to the noise if the bosses decide to fuck. Take it outside of camp.

One of the newer members -- an teenaged engineering whiz named Emma Willis -- leaps to her feet. She arrived with a few other children and a teacher dying of radiation poisoning in a Phoenix-marked schoolbus stuffed with supplies for a school as an offering.

The caretakers at the Spire let a nine-year-old orphan basically live inside the run-down computer lab that they rigged up under some solar panels. Then someone found a backup of Wikipedia on a flash drive and Emma was the one who cracked using it. Then she figured out how to get patchy, slow, but functional internet off a satellite cell phone someone recovered that's apparently up paid forever by some rich asshole. The next thing anyone knew, Emma was making laser-precise requests to scavengers, leading to flash drives by the bucketful and more and more time caspules of downloaded websites. This last winter, Alex and Maggie realized they had a thirteen-year-old who could divert an electric fence's wire safely with food-handler's gloves, had trained herself on a Japanese katana someone found, and had memorized not only ammo types but the interchange points between Western and Soviet shells where one could be shoehorned into the other.

It was going to be impossible to _stop her_ if she wanted to come on this mission unless Kara held her down. So they just wrapped her in armor that weighs what she does and told her to stay back with the other non-frontline guys.

"What's up?"

Willis flips to the page she had turned over in the book.

"Whoever this is, this is a big deal. As in, we need them on our side big. These are electrician's schematics."

"So? Lots of places are working on restringing light bulbs." 

"So...light bulbs and ceiling fans don't operate on fifty millivolts. They operate on a hundred and twenty volts in the US, quarter-million times that. But computer processors do. And this is a hell of a tangle of wires for anything else. Looks like _mostly_ a USB connector's header except someone spliced four more 5V pins so it can power larger gear. This is postwar stuff, for sure. There's scribblings about using lead solder, which was low-quality stuff at the end, and some highly sleep-deprived sketches of...making a cable stripper out of pruning shears? Not sure. But the author is making notes about radiation shielding and there are notes about which Walmarts they hit for parts, you name it."

Alex clicks her tongue.

"Who's bothering to build a computer right now? Use one, maybe. But build one? Design one? I mean, not really innovative unless it has a refrigerator built-in. Or hot running water. That, I'd pay $9.99 a month for."

"Letter!" Maggie shouts, holding it up. "They're using codenames but it looks like correspondence with someone they've talked to before."

Archivist,

My dear friend. I hope this finds you well, unirradiated and un-shot.

Once we leave Round Rock, I wish to make for Toledo. 

The cache there has a malfunctioning shortwave and isn't receiving Apocabook updates. Once I repair it I will dump the electronics, masonry, and tool and die books into the system. That hamlet in Georgia paid handsomely in digging tips for them.

If you wish to join me for the company on the road, I'd relish it. If you wish to stay with the gentle ghosts of ladies lost, I more than understand. Let's decide before we leave.

Watchmaker.

  
PS--When you're ready, ask for "Bitchy Tammy" at the Mechanical Bull. Still can't work one of my toes...

  
Maggie flips through some loose paper.

"Partial reply. Never got past the salutation. But the courier note matches well date wise."

"The what now?" Thompson, one of their youngest, asks.

"Dear Frank," Maggie explains, waving her arms like a lunatic. "I hope this finds you well. Please tie my arms down before I hurt myself. Maggie."

"The first part, the 'dear Frank' is a salutation."

"Oh."

"Stick with us," Alex chuckles. "Well make a regular civilized gentleman out of you."

"So we got a queer woman," Maggie decides. "With a probably queer female friend, writing about books and storage caches and information trade with settlements all over the eastern two-thirds of the damn country. And Bitchy Tammy at the Mechanical Bull."

She leans close to Alex.

"Are we _sure_ her holiness isn't pranking us?"

"It's not on the nose enough for Kara. That would be a puppy scavenger hunt you're thinking of. Find all the hidden puppies."

"Oh," Maggie mutters. "Yeah, that's more her."

Maggie leans back out to address the group.

"Anything to add to that?"

Jameson comes in from outside the tunnel, bouncing some funny orange mud in his hand.

"Ink packet. The person opened the orange-white ink packet for use in case of capture."

Alex lets out a breath she must have been holding since they left.

"Oh, thank Rao and the Golden One. At least the Geiger counters can help us when we get close. Everyone remember to set yours to the third tick on the dial before we move out."

Maggie spins on her heel and speaks over her shoulder.

"As an exception to the rule, if anyone knows where this whorehouse the Mechanical Bull is, I will _not_ be mad at you for using it. One time exception."

Willis' hand shoots up and her pinked-up cheeks and buzz-cut red hair slowly retreat into her coat's collar.

"I snuck out for my birthday..." she whimpers. "It's about ten miles back from our border. Off-road, to the north in one of the free-rule areas."

Alex pinches her nose. 

_Of course she got out, hit up a whorehouse in an anarchist zone, didn't get murdered and made it back. All. Undetected. Probably curled up inside a wheat barrel or something._

There's illegal, there's dangerous and then there's just stupid. The fact that Emma doesn't have a mother means there's really no one to scold her about stupid but legal. Emma, naturally, misbehaves only in ways that aren't against any rules except the under-my-roof-young-lady variety. 

"I'm dragging your scrawny, freckled ass up to the Head of the Healing Guild for testing the instant we're back," Maggie grumbles. "But thank you."

"Can we keep it?" Alex asks out of the side of her mouth.

"We are almost old enough to be her mother," Maggie sighs.

"All right. Emma's directions are on point. Emma herself is in the back. With me. In case her ladybits rot and fall off on and need to be taped on. Jesus Christ, girl."

"The girls at the Spire are all...intimidating," Emma whines. "And like, strong and tan and...big...farm-girly...yeah. I'm just going to radio silence my mouth now."


	7. Well...Fuck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where sooner or later, something in the wasteland was bound to go badly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The pre-war Earth had metas, alien refugees, and all other things that were canon on Supergirl earth (Earth-38) around the start of Season 1 (plus the Earth-1 and Justice League heroes).

**Lena - +7 years**

Lena is very lightheaded when the drug fades. This means that it's time for her biannual capturing by some lunatic who thinks he can squeeze the magic of the nanites out of her like she's a goddamned orange. Jack set up the control program so that the central node the nanites made -- far as she can tell -- is somewhere deep in her spine. All they get is blood that seems to be scrubbed to match O-negative rather than her blood type at birth but becomes ordinary a few paces away from her body. Sooner or later, they unlock her to piss or shit or eat and she has her moment. The same reason they want her is why it's so stupid to capture her.

She'd hoped it would be winter. Hurts less to stagger around with her brain pumping phantom pain from gunshot wounds in the winter. Snow helps her wipe the blood off. Jess seems less spooked that way.

Everything should hurt. It doesn't.

"Lovely," Lena groans, lifting her head to look at her right arm. Chain. Needle. Line. Blood bag. All smelling of disinfectant. So better than average setup.

"You do realize there's only so much, right?" she yells at what looks like a panel of one-way glass.

"You'll be released when the testing is completed, Miss Luthor," a man's voice answers. "Unharmed. The American People thank you."

_White nationalists. Heritage types. Splendid._

"Oh fuck me!" Lena laughs. "What? You couldn't _have_ enough brain cancer to think that you're still serving America. I was there when it died, you skinhead assholes! When arrogant pasty-dicked whiners like you betrayed it! I felt Boston _burn_ along with every nerve in my body. While you were some half-melted _lump_ in your daddy's diseased ballsack!"

"Now, now, dear. That's no way to address an officer."

"Mother? Fucking General Sam Lane?"

Lena sags in the chains she's suspended in.

"I'd ask you to shoot me but..."

* * *

**Alex - +7 years**

Mechanical Bull, as hellholes go, is quite charming. The paint on the bricks is fresh, the beer stains seemed to be hosed off after they stain but before they grow mold, the tangle of vehicles and bikes parked seems to have tried to follow the grooves in the dirt lot with a loose interpretation of what 'inside' means geometrically.

Alex lowers the binoculars and disconnects the optics from her armor's helmet. She twirls her fingertip over the control panels' crystals, trying to decide on a disguise.

"Biker jacket babe," Maggie laughs, choosing her own projection -- a painted-on band shirt and jeans number so distracting it is going to get Alex killed in combat one day -- and watching as the suit's outer layer shivers and trembles. The real one is back in the Spire but if Alex's hand -- and only Alex's -- got close, the suit would part so she could cop a feel.

"Always the biker jacket."

Kara built them. Tore down the last of her cousin's legacy to make them. Kryptonian bodysuit under nanite-shifted composite, fully sealed, self-powered, reinforced, jet-assisted movement. There are no Coluan or Kryptonian guns to match the board computers which can't be retooled, so Kara rigged up swords and emitters to dump heat from the microreactors in short, blowtorch-like cones.

Maggie and Alex are the only people who have a combat kit anywhere close to this. In combat, distant second to Kara herself but enough to spar with a careful-enough Kara and placing everyone else a massively distant _third_ to them. Their team has the best body armor human militaries ever made, cobbled piece by piece from corpses. Something like the Spire needs not only soldiers but monsters. Nightmares. Vengeful spirits. Demons

Enter Alex and Maggie in these suits.

"You know what'd be great? If we had a third suit like this so something stood a better than even chance of keeping Willis alive."

"Right?"

Kara agreed with Emma. It was time for the big guns. Doubling back for the Devil's Horns and the team's heavy weapons cost almost a whole day and booting up this armor's systems entirely rather than just using the bodysuit takes three hours.

This woman, whoever she is, is playing the same game they are: rebuild civilization on purpose layer-by-layer rather than by grabbing scrap and piling it with no system. She is to be located, rescued and returned alive to the Golden Spire. 

"Remember the plan, guys. Six-man teams, up on the ridges there, and there, and there. If we can do this smoothly, we do that. We do it rough but without showing our hand, we will. I'll signal with a yellow-white. If I don't signal and you _do_ hear shooting? Maggie and I had to drop the act. So just act spooked when we come back out."

Demos smirks.

"Aye-aye."

Maggie grabs a properly-sheepish Emma by the shoulder.

"You're going to show us around and if you don't do anything stupid, I won't ask Eliza to velcro you shut until you start thinking with your head not your vadge."

"Again, I'm sorry!" she squeaks.

"Again, I'm going to introduce you to a nice girl back home and _bolt your feet to her_ bed, Emma. It's not that whores are evil, kid. Hell. They're paid better per hour than anyone else. It's that they have no protection from _diseases out here,_ kid, not like we do and we don't have what people used to. You're going to be amazing whatever you do in life. Just...try and live long enough to do it," Maggie warns her. "Please? For Aunt Maggie?"

"Fine." Emma sniffs. "But only for Aunt Maggie."

"She's our mascot," Demos decides. "The Little Lunatic Who Could."

"Oh, it's official," Vasquez agrees.

"Stow your shit!" Alex and Maggie yell back in unison.

\-----

The doors are swinging, saloon type numbers. Nice touch.

The aforementioned bulls, three of them, are in the middle of the floor surrounded by sloshed beer and in one case, a puking woman in a stained, cut-off T-Shirt.

It almost looks like a place that existed before. Almost.

There's thirty-odd patrons, four or five women roaming the floor in worn-down lingerie sets whose sashaying and perfume offer the illusion of more.

"No offense, ma'am. Ma'ams, I suppose. But do we have a plan that doesn't involve violence or should we make one?" Emma whispers as soon as Maggie and Alex pilot them into a booth in the corner.

"M'listening," Alex grits out.

"That," Emma tells them, lifting a finger towards a beefy, broad-hipped brunette lounging near the bar, buck naked, thighs apart, drinking a pre-war bottle of beer and leaking her last customer onto a towel, acting bored as hell by her crowd of admirers. "Is Bitchy Tammy."

"She looks it."

"She's not," Emma replies. "She's actually really kind in private. I couldn't afford her but she helped me sneak out when I slept past closing. It's an act. See the bills?"

She points at men waving paper money at Tammy.

"Hundred-mark Lone Stars, Mexican pesos with the new flag, leftover fifty-dollar notes. Five times one of the other girls and she's not biting. She's making them _bid_ for her attention."

"But what's the plan?" Maggie inquires. "I mean, yeah. Muscular butches but I have one at home."

"Flatterer," Alex huffs.

"Wait..."

"Oh no!" Alex grumbles, pointing her finger between Maggie and Emma. "You two do not get to start looping around, giving each other worse and worse ideas until I pick one before I die of sheer panic."

Maggie produces the dental dams from somewhere in her suits' storage compartments, sliding them over to Emma.

"Four rounds, kid. What's lesson number one in rifleman camp, course two?"

"Never use your last bullet," Emma replies instantly. "Assume one more hostile than you have rounds for."

"Attagirl."

Maggie flags down a server. She produces a brick of Mexican pesos -- who knows what raid captured them -- which are actually worth something because non-nuclear nations typically have a few surviving cities.

"My wife and I would like to buy our daughter a couple hours with Tammy."

\-----

"It has not been a _couple_ hours," Alex yawns. "Good lord. Tammy is a tank. Emma's so tiny I think maybe someone shaved a baby deer, put boobs on it and gave it a hand-beaten brass nose ring. Are we _sure_ Emma is human? I'm betting thrillseeker White Martian or con-artist Valeronian."

"I mean, it would explain a lot, the Valeronian thing. Ran into some on the force. Couldn't resist trouble. Shoplifting, fence jumping, flashing. All little stuff. But always _pushing_. Like they weren't happy in the middle, only once they pushed the edge and someone pushed back. The suspects I arrested gave me the feeling that I don't think they had it good back home. Those who made it here were the ones who made it out of all the scrapes back there."

"Three beers," Maggie decides. "Valeronian or half."

"Six beers," Alex bets. "Microbrew. Human. We're not _total_ lightweights, babe."

Emma skips happily down not long after dawn, Tammy in hand, and leads them upstairs.

"So apparently, the woman we're looking for is an associate of Lena Luthor," Emma reports. "Engineer or something. Civil engineer. Fixes buildings in exchange for how-to manuals. Tammy's had Lena as a client. The other one comes in but doesn't talk. Stares at the stripper pole and drinks. Some kind of yearly ritual."

Tammy shrugs.

"She's a talker. Lots of cool stories, reminds me of when I could take actual road trips. Before. Lena's also a _mover_ so telling tales after doesn't put her at risk."

Tammy pushes open a door to what looks like a closet.

Hogtied on the floor is a man with a bruised dick, lacerated thighs and a gunshot wound to the left shoulder.

Emma presses a derringer, probably borrowed from a nightstand, into the base of his spine. There's a cut on her hand, bleeding goopy, translucent, slightly glittery something out of her otherwise pink human skin.

"You owe me those microbrews, dear," Maggie jokes, nodding at the blood.

"It is just not my night," Alex groans.

"What?" Emma mumbles. "Holy fuck! What's that? I felt him cut me but it wasn't bad. So why am I leaking _fucking hot glue_ right now?"

_And she doesn't even know. Orphan. Fuck. Kara can help, hopefully._

"Tell the nice ladies where the Sons of Adam get their baby formula delivered, please and thanks."

"Look, I don't get into militia business and I don't know what's wrong with this extra-small Fleshlight bu-"

"Wrong answer," Emma purrs, spinning the revolver's chamber a sixth of a turn. "But my moms like me to play nice with strangers so I'll give you a freebie."

"I actually would listen to her," Maggie suggests.

"I mean, we bought her birthday dinner and everything..."

"Okay!" 

"Draw us a map," Alex tells him, nudging the pencil and paper with her boot.

She leans close to Emma.

"What the hell did you promise Tammy?"

"Huh? Oh. Apparently, she'd been thinking of moving and taking a crack at our area solo. Initially, she was demanding a full-on license to operate in the Spire but I convinced her to just resettle and we could start at a bar and inn, instead of a brothel, have the Seat figure out whether to legalize. Had to whittle her down for a while longer."

"Enthusiasm rather than actual expertise, let's say," Tammy jokes. 

She is leaning in the doorway, keeping gawkers back and casting a buxom, meaty shadow across the floorboards. 

"Fuck me," Alex groans. "I mean, not literally."

"I know. That one is so obvious that the goddamn pillows know you're married, Red. S'cute."

Emma holds out the dental dam package.

"Saved one round, just like you two taught me."

\-----

Alex turns to the team as Maggie counts shells on a notepad and studies the map to the Sons of Adam compound.

"Thompson, Demos, take Willis and Miss..."

"Santiago."

"Miss Santiago to the Spire. No stops, straight through. Get a settler's token stamped for Santiago, my authority. Take Willis for sexual disease testing at _gunpoint_ if you have to, understand soldier?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Vasquez and Jameson, secure motorized transit for fifty heartbeats. Sons of Adam popped back up."

"Oh, come on!" Vasquez groans. "Didn't we?"

"Make an example out of the adult males? Yes. Seems our mistake was to _maim_ not kill. One of them is the 'prophet' now. Leans on one of his wives rather than a cane for the bad leg." 

"This is ridiculous..." Vas grumbles.

Alex slings a grenade belt over her shoulder and tosses the other to Maggie.

"It is. This time, we're going to make it a ghost story. We'll ride ahead, Maggie and I ping their perimeter. When you guys link up, we're going to make them think the Golden One herself is kicking their ass. This time, we go straight for the breeding pens and schoolhouse, load up the women and girls first. If it has balls? We blow them off. Priority is females. Boys after we interview the women. Once they're safely away, sweep team. Volunteers only. That's a different sort of killing. Won't order you to."

\-----

Alex throws the guard's skull into the wall in front of her over and over. She doesn't need the suit's thruster rockets to assist for this. She's sizzling with adrenaline. His still spurting cock pumps out a final watery blast on the wall as his gray matter leaks down to meet it. She plucks the keycard from his belt and drop the opacity on her helmet's glass.

"You alive?" she asks the woman who she just pulled him off of.

"Yes," she sniffs. "Thank you."

"Office, you said?"

"The building through there, yeah. One of them they were leaving alone totally. Some kind of mark on her."

"Ink?"

"Yeah, like orange ink. Exactly. Didn't wash. Got on anyone she touched, no matter what. So they had her put on gloves and type papers. She and another woman they took at the same time who they didn't use much because she had been a teacher."

"Rao preserve us. Thanks. Truck's idling at the inner gate. You good to get there?"

"After a couple of minutes, I think so, yeah. Is the Spire like they say it is?"

"I'm sure some of the stories make it taller than it is. It's not here, that's for damn sure. When you get there, there are folks who can help you deal with..."

Alex waves her hands at her surroundings.

"This."

\-----

Alex finds their enigma, who turns out to be a small, bespectacled Asian woman in a beyond threadbare tweed skirt that must have been on her since the War. Curled against her is a naked black woman with springy red curls, faintly bruised and freshly washed skin. A sponge and a water basin sits between them.

"I'm Jess, she's Pam. I don't care if you're the Queen of the Spire. Whatever you want, _she's_ my condition for even listening to a fucking word you say. She comes with, she gets help, she gets whatever you animals have for therapy and if they knocked her up, that _thing_ inside her does not draw one single breath. Until I get that you can just fuck all the way off," Jess snarls. "And then close the door behind you."

A flick of the wrist retracts the knife Alex had used to cut the guard's throat back into the armor. She offers Jess her hand.

"You're mad. Respect that. But I'm actually here for you and well, the women they were using. So consider it done. I'm not the queen but, yeah...we came for the flare. Found your backpack. Impressive shit. So at this point, I'm the one listening."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lillian and Sam Lane, like their fellow racists and other cockroaches, are really hard to kill.  
> \-----  
> Emma is my precocious murder child now. Her adoptive moms are Alex and Maggie and she's going to give them both gray hair.


End file.
